One Stupid Keystroke Exposed Sysadmin To Inappropriate Information He Could Not Unsee
The Register, Monday, February 24th, 2025
Turns out you can be too careful checking that backups worked
On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates your escapes from dangerous tech support requests.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Tom" who told a tale of his early 1980s experience as the de facto tech support guy for what he's pretty sure was the first Air Force squadron to adopt PCs.
"These were dual floppy disk computers (possible Tandy 1000s?) running either Windows 1.0 or CP/M," he told On Call.
Files written under one OS could not be read when using the other. The supplier of the PCs therefore provided an application called "FORMATS" that translated files into a usable format for whichever OS users decided to employ.
FORMATS was a foolish name for that utility, because the command FORMAT erases disks.